Actually, i stopped following everyone, but i couldnt find a way to write that title that still sounded like proper english. But anyway, two days ago i stopped following every single follower @pyrogenicmedia. Why? Well for the most part it was all spam anyway. Ive never really taken twitter that seriously, and it doesnt drive all too much traffic to this site.
If anything, i really wanted to see how much of a drop i would get if i stopped following everyone. Alot of people nowadays use bots/websites that remove all followers who arent following you back (Reciprocal followers i guess?). This actually used to be built into Twitter but they removed it sometime last year. So if i stopped following everyone, everyone who is a bot (Or atleast using an app to track who is following them), will stop following me.
The result? :
So a drop of almost 2k followers. Seems pretty bad, but in actual fact i was expecting it to drop far more then this. And today it kind of levelled out and i didnt lose too many. But i expect the number to keep falling till i get to about 2k.
How did i remove everyone at once? Well i sure as hell didn’t sit there unfollowing 6000 people. I used John Chow’s service UnfollowAll. Although it did take me several goes to get it all the way through. Apparently CURL (Php Web calls for non tech folk), has a timeout of 30 seconds. So it would unfollow everyone it could in 30 seconds, then crash, and i would have to restart it and get it going again. Definitely reccomend the service if you need to clear out a Twitter Account.
O and if you want me to follow you again, send me a DM or something. Actually thats another upside, not following everyone on twitter means you dont get a million spam messages clogging up your twitter DM box.
Although.. noone can DM you if you aren’t following them
so I guess you’ll never follow us again hehe
I still don’t understand why you would remove all your followers on your main account.. a test account, sure, for testing purposes, but on your main account..
.. it’s scary!
I got some of my accounts suspended recently because I ‘unfollowed’ those who werent following me, and then used Phoenix to do keyword searches to do some following .. unfortunately, I think I might of re-followed some of the ones that I had previously ‘unfollowed’ and as a result, Twitter put the hammer down on me.
Twitter has re-enabled the accounts (thank goodness) after they realized I’m not a spammer and didn’t intentionally do it (and 2 emails later which was great – thank you Twitter!) but re-iterated the rules to me.. that you are not to use automated software to add or remove followers – the only ‘automation’ they “allow” is the automatic following of people who follow you. :/
I need to now be even more careful about not re-following people I’ve previously ‘unfollowed’.. which makes automatic software a bit difficult if it doesn’t record the ‘unfollow’.. which I can think of only a couple that do, and now of course am a bit wary of using any automation software.
But as a consultant that manages many client’s accounts, I need to find a way to automate else I’ll end up wasting hours doing it via the website.. and the twitter site *hurts*… it’s a real time-stealer.
Why am I mentioning? because if you ever intend to re-follow your followers now on your main account.. you might get detected by twitter’s extra-sensitive “Suspicious behaviour” detector and get your account suspended.
Ha penny! Long time no see. I was keeping a keen eye on your blog for a while but you stopped updating it
Ha is that right? O man well that really sucks. Well i guess ill be a lonely person for a while
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Well just recently, they have shut down things like Twitter Karma, and i think also Mutuality.com for unfollowing those who dont follow you. Hence why i used that “UnfollowAll” service. At the moment im not really worried about bans, ive survived some pretty vicious adding and unfollowing in the past within quick succession without a ban. But they have been cracking down i will admit that.
Twitter can now suspend your account for mass unfollowing. They state “The only auto-following behavior Twitter allows is auto-follow-back (following a user after they have followed you). Automated un-following is also not permitted.” from http://help.twitter.com/forums/26810/entries/76915
There are some automated tools that add you to a list that marks you as a user who unfollows.
No users monitoring the list will follow you.